The automotive industry is facing a radical change driven by the digitization of mobility. As a result of this change, software-based functionality is becoming the major driver for innovations in future vehicles. Automotive companies are struggling with the increasing role of software and the relevance of a maintainable and extensible E/E architecture, which is why software development is now becoming a major reason for project delays and budget overruns in automotive development.

In this talk, I provide an overview of how software engineering for automotive systems is performed today and which challenges we face in the future. I show how we, as software engineers and software engineering researchers, can improve this situation and argue that software engineering for and around the automobile will be one of the most exciting areas in the near future.